Mobile Trends: Youth engagement on mobile phones

Posted on 12. Mar, 2010 by hardeep in Blog

The urban Indian youth is mobile savvy compared to other age groups. With the advent of internet access on mobile phones, there has been a further increase in mobile usage across Young India.

As per a report by business blog Trak.in, India is currently the second largest mobile market in the world after China  with average monthly subscribers of 10-12 million.  The report highlights numerous important bits of information that help draw out a coherent understanding of the mobile market in India.

Two important facts revealed by the report are:

  1. In terms of SMS contests, an overwhelming number of subscribers participate in more than one SMS contest.Females leave behind their male counterparts with over 60% participation in comparison to only 49% by the latter.
  2. Among the various Value Added Services (VAS) subscribers mostly use services pertaining to Jokes and Astrology with statistics as high 52% and 48%  respectively followed by News updates ( 44%) and Jobs (43%).

Another report by Pluggd.in reveals that Indian urban youth are most likely to use VAS services for Jokes (56.2%)  followed by  Jobs (46.2%), News Alerts (44.7%) , Sports (43.2%) and Astrology (42.9%). The report also tells us that only 1 in 3 subscribers follow-up after receiving SMS promotional messages. Compared to other age groups, young urban Indians are most likely to visit a store to inquire after receiving the promotional SMS but not very likely to make a purchase.

The above statistics definitely act as a guide for marketers. The information reveals that urban Indian Youth is active and engaged on their mobile phones. This could be because most of them cannot afford a PC or a laptop on their own and thus the mobile phone becomes a convenient and constant digital companion. They use their digital friends to access the information that they prefer and ignore anything else. While brands have an opportunity to connect with the youth by undertaking various tactics like building a mobile website, creating mobile apps and running sms campaigns; they should concentrate on engaging the youth by providing the relevant context and not restrict themselves to promotion alone.

An interesting fact revealed by the Trak.in report was that Delhi mobile subscribers lead in use of social networking on their handsets (10%)  followed by Mumbai (6.4%) and Chennai (4%). Not surprisingly the most popular social network accessed is Orkut followed by Facebook. While the numbers for social networking on mobile is low, a substantial number of urban Indian mobile subscribers frequent Google (45.6%) and Yahoo (30.9%). Accessing internet on the phone is a growing phenomenon among Indian mobile subscribers and most likely spearheaded by the urban youth population. With India among the top ten nations who use Twitter, we can expect the urban Indian youth to increasingly be present online using their mobile phones.

(This post was collaboratively written by Hardeep and Freddie)

Tags: , , , ,

Leave a Reply